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Missile Defense

Technology has always found its greatest consumer in a nation's war and defense efforts. Since the last attempts at a "Star Wars" defense system, has technology changed considerably enough to make the latest Missile Defense initiatives more successful? Can such an application of science be successful? Is a militarized space inevitable, necessary or impossible?

Read Debates, a new Web-only feature culled from Readers' Opinions, published every Thursday.

fredmoore - 01:54pm Jul 10, 2003 EST (# 12929 of 12931)

"" Keneally said it cost as much to house an asylum seeker on Christmas Island or Nauru under the Government's "Pacific Solution" as it would to put them through a medical degree at Sydney University "with beer money on the side". ""

Keneally is all wrong. Only ONE terror transplant cell would need to slip through the vet-net and it would costya packet, costya carr, costya life. That's a tad more than Aussies' should be asked to pay.

An asylum system which discourages hordes of unvetted boat-people is, on the above analysis a very cost effective instrument in the long term. Further, it encourages asylum seekers to apply through proper chanels to enter the country legitimately and to within the funded capacity of that country to receive them.

rshow55 - 05:20pm Jul 10, 2003 EST (# 12930 of 12931)
Can we do a better job of finding truth? YES. Click "rshow55" for some things Lchic and I have done and worked for on this thread.

Blair Aides Don't Expect to Find Iraqi Weapons, Reports Say By WARREN HOGE http://www.nytimes.com/2003/07/10/international/worldspecial/10CND-WEAP.html?hp

LONDON, July 10 — Senior officials in Prime Minister Tony Blair's government say they no longer believe weapons of mass destruction will be uncovered in Iraq, British news organizations reported today.

Alistaire Cooke Monday, 30 June, 2003, 10:17 GMT 11:17 UK Were we misled into war? http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/programmes/letter_from_america/3031728.stm

By Wednesday morning however I woke to the frank admission that what I'd been doing was dreaming up as many odd stories as possible so as to shirk, to evade, avoid, to shun the one looming question already a thunderous sound in Britain, but here only just rising to a general protest.

And it's a question that must be answered. It is this: were we misled into war, by whom and for what motives?

On the eve of the invasion of Iraq more than half the American population thought that it was a terrible but necessary act and that what the administration was saying was, better a short war - we hope short - now than a long war very likely involving nuclear and chemical weapons next year or the year after.

Most moderate supporters of an invasion, in Britain and in this country, in the United Nations and out of it, complained that the very large body of opinion against any war never offered an alternative, except to give up on Saddam or to trust in indefinite inspection from the team of more than 200 members - the United Nations inspectors - who'd been inspecting continuously from 1991 till 98.

The pressing reason for going to war was the dinningly repeated reports, before the Security Council of the United Nations, given by the president to the Congress, by Secretary of Defence Rumsfeld in his press conferences and by Secretary of State Colin Powell wherever he travelled and begged for allies.

The reason was that Saddam Hussein, having flouted for 12 years the Security Council's orders and the truce treaty that he'd signed, was now a clear and present danger to the security of not only his region, most of all to Israel, but to the security of the United States itself - because he was hiding and refusing to destroy weapons of mass destruction and the makings of biochemical weapons that had rained agonised deaths on thousands of Iranians and on his own subjects.

That after 12 years of begging him to come clean, 12 years of time to build up a nuclear capability and enlarge his chemical resources, the time had come to say, no more.

We now have to ask how much substance there was in that argument - how much intention - how much muddle. And ask and why and how it was impossible that the situation with Iraq to have been resolved - many years ago.

Standard Operating Procedure By PAUL KRUGMAN http://www.nytimes.com/2003/06/03/opinion/03KRUG.html

The mystery of Iraq's missing weapons of mass destruction has become a lot less mysterious. . . . .

But the important point is that this isn't about Saddam: it's about us. The public was told that Saddam posed an imminent threat. If that claim was fraudulent, the selling of the war is arguably the worst scandal in American political history — worse than Watergate, worse than Iran-contra. Indeed, the idea that we were deceived into war makes many commentators so uncomfortable that they refuse to admit the possibility.

But here's the thought that should make those commentators really uncomfortable. Suppose that this administration did con us into war. And suppose that it is not held accountable for its deceptions, so Mr. Bush can fight what Mr. Hastings calls a "khaki election" next year. In that case, our political system has become utterly, and perhaps irrevocably, corrupted.

Perhaps not quite i

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